Shared Culture, Then and Now
What The Brady Bunch once revealed about culture and what has changed since
By Conrad Phillip Kottak
In late February of this year, I heard from a former student, Jay Nordlinger, now a well-known journalist and fellow Substack columnist. He was working on a piece about American culture and wrote to ask about something I had lectured on and published years ago: The Brady Bunch. I had used the show as an example of shared American (popular) culture, something students across the country could recognize and discuss in common.
The Brady Bunch as shared cultural reference point.
Jay’s inquiry, along with the column he went on to write (which I previously restacked here), sent me back to that earlier piece. When I first wrote it, I could assume a kind of cultural overlap among my students. Even if they hadn’t watched The Brady Bunch when it originally aired, they had encountered it in reruns.
What, if anything, functions today as shared American culture? What do students come home to now, and how much of it do they actually share with one another?
Those questions lead directly to my original piece.
Brady Bunch Nirvana
By Conrad Phillip Kottak
One teaching technique I started using several years ago, taking advantage of students’ familiarity with television, is to demonstrate changes in American kinship and marriage patterns by contrasting the TV programs of the 1950s with more recent ones. (Students know about the history of sitcom families from syndicated reruns, especially on the cable channel Nickelodeon.) In the 1950s, the usual TV family was a nuclear family consisting of employed dad, homemaker mom, and kids. Examples include Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It to Beaver. These programs, appropriate for the 1950s market, are dramatically out of sync with today’s social and economic realities. Only 16 million American women worked outside the home in 1950, compared with three times that number today. Today less than 7 percent of American households fit the former ideal: breadwinner father, homemaker mother, and two children.
The Cleavers, representing a 1950s nuclear family ideal.
Most of my students (even at the millennium) have watched reruns of the 1960s family series The Brady Bunch, whose social organization offers an instructive contrast with 1950s programs. Here a new, blended family forms when a widow with three daughters marries a widower with three sons. Blended families have been increasing in American society because of more frequent divorce and remarriage. When The Brady Bunch first aired, divorce was too controversial to give rise to a prime-time TV family. Widow(er)hood had to be the basis of the blended family, as it was in The Brady Bunch.
The Brady husband-father was a successful architect. The Bradys were wealthy enough to employ a housekeeper, Alice. Mirroring American culture when the program was made, the wife’s career was part-time and subsidiary. Women lucky enough to find wealthy husbands didn’t compete with other women, even professional housekeepers, in the workforce.
Each time I begin my kinship lecture using sitcom material, a few people in the class immediately recognize (from reruns) the nuclear families of the 1950s, especially the Beaver Cleaver family. And when I start diagramming the Bradys, students start shouting out their names: “Jan,” “Bobby,” “Greg,” “Cindy,” “Marsha,” “Peter,” “Mike,” “Carol,” “Alice.” As the cast of characters nears completion, my class, filled with TV-enculturated natives, is usually shouting out in unison names made almost as familiar as their parents through exposure to TV reruns. My students almost seem to find nirvana (a feeling of religious ecstasy) through their collective remembrance of the Bradys and in the ritual-like incantation of their names.
Given its massive penetration of the modern home (at least 98 percent of all households), television’s effects on our socialization and enculturation can hardly be trivial. Indeed, the common information and knowledge we acquire by watching the same TV programs is indisputably culture in the anthropological sense. Culture is collective, shared, meaningful. It is transmitted by conscious and unconscious learning experiences acquired by humans, not through their genes but as a result of growing up in a particular society. Of the hundreds of culture bearers who have passed through the Anthropology 101 classroom over the past decade, many have been unable to recall the full names of their parents’ first cousins. Some have forgotten their grandmother’s maiden name. But most have absolutely no trouble identifying names and relationships in a family that exists only in television land.
Post Nirvana: From Mass Culture to Segmented Worlds
When I first wrote that piece, I could rely on something that no longer exists in quite the same way: a shared (mass) cultural baseline.
Over roughly the past 75 years, one of the most important cultural shifts has been a movement from massification to segmental appeal. Mid-20th-century media, dominated by a small number of networks, produced large, overlapping audiences. Today’s media environment does the opposite. It multiplies choices and sorts people into narrower streams.
There is still mass culture. The national anthem remains widely shared. Major sporting events still gather large audiences. But these are increasingly exceptions rather than the rule.
For the most part, we now inhabit individualized media worlds. To be sure, some of these worlds are familiar to large segments of the population. Viewers of Fox News, for example, tend to share certain perspectives, just as viewers of MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) share others. But beyond such clusters, media consumption is increasingly shaped by algorithms, habits, and personal preference.
I see this even in my own family. I have three younger grandchildren, two teenagers and one preteen. One of them, like her grandfather, favors her smartphone; another often works (or plays Roblox) on a standalone Mac; the third gravitates to her iPad. What they watch, follow, and engage with differs not only by age but by gender and individual taste. They are growing up not in a single shared media environment, but in parallel ones.
From shared screens to individualized media worlds.
This is not a trivial change. It affects how culture is transmitted, how common ground is established, and how social understanding is built.
So the question remains: What, if anything, do we still share?
Is there anything today that functions as The Brady Bunch once did, providing a common cultural touchstone across lines of class, region, and background? Or has American culture become a mosaic of overlapping but largely separate worlds?
I ask my readers for help answering these questions.